School Rumble 2nd Semester - Part One

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What exactly is rumbling here? The world may never know.

By D. F. Smith

The neat thing about Funimation's production job on School Rumble is that they make no bones about just how ridiculous the series is. It says so right on the back of the box – "When we finally figure out what this show's about, we'll tell you!"

Honesty like that is refreshing. A lot of goofy nonsense gets sold as high art on the American anime market, and such has been the case ever since the bad old days, when we were expected to take stuff like the Lensman movie seriously. School Rumble is a preposterously fluffy romantic comedy, and Funimation sells it as nothing less and nothing more.

If you missed the first "semester" of the series, which came out over the past year and a half or so, it doesn't take much remedial education to get up to speed. Tenma (cute, sweet, girl-next-door) has a crush on Karasuma (cool, aloof, oblivious). Harima (macho, delinquent, means well) has a crush on Tenma in turn. Then there's Eri (tall, blond, heiress) who has the corresponding one-way crush on Harima. And so the chain goes in typical anime romantic-comedy fashion, where nobody falls for anyone who falls for them back.

Sometimes a show like this can go badly wrong – take Honey & Clover, for instance, a series that's eventually crushed flat under a punishing weight of built-up angst. School Rumble, in a stroke of luck for everyone concerned, refuses to ever let too much angst build up. It starts fluffy and stays fluffy. It does not, as Funimation makes clear, ever take itself too seriously.

Whether we really needed a whole 'nother series of it is a question your personal taste can answer. (There's a third series that just got done airing in Japan, actually, but that one hasn't made it near American shores yet.) The second season goes pretty far on sheer aggressive comic overkill, though – the core of things is still the same tail-chasing romantic run-around, but the show plays off that with with a constant stream of new sight gags, puns, and bouts of guttural screaming from characters like the desperately lovelorn Hanai-kun. (Hanai likes Tenma's sister Yakumo, who doesn't actually like Harima, but everyone thinks she does. Someone else probably has a thing for Hanai, too, but her name momentarily escapes us.)

The sight gags deserve some special praise. Usually, this kind of comedy is an excuse to cut down on the animation budget, but School Rumble dishes out for all kinds of wild action and goofy dream sequences. This season kicks off with a hilarious parody of old-fashioned samurai movies (later topped by a riff on hard-boiled gambling drama), and it keeps on plowing through weird visual humor almost faster than you can pick up the punch lines.

If you're ready to accept the fact that the series is never going to provide a genuine romantic payoff – if that happened, where would all the gags come from? – there's potentially a lot of fun to be had here. The second season is coming out in nice, compact editions, too. Instead of buying four episodes every other month, these new sets deliver 13 episodes at once, and at a much more reasonable price. Once again, School Rumble may not be the greatest comedy series, but Funimation is certainly doing a pretty great job with it.